Skeptic Claire Dederer considers the quirks of yoga in 'Poser'

Comedian Ellen DeGeneres has a bit in her stand-up routine about yoga, being in full lotus position, chakras aligned, looking out of her third eye. The works.

"It's amazing what comes up when you sit in that silence," she confides. " 'Mama keeps whites bright like the sunlight. Mama's got the magic of Clorox 2.' "

Yoga is funny in the right hands.

Essayist and critic Claire Dederer takes a similarly ironic approach to the ancient Indian practice in her first book, "Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses."

Lest one fear fuzzy, New Age-y revelations, know this: Dederer is a Seattle habitue and devotee of punk rock. One need only read her description of the Lion pose to sample her irreverence:

"Back in college, we used to have a silly rubric: Never have sex with anyone who doesn't like Van Morrison. They will be bad in bed. This notion was based on the fact that Van Morrison is embarrassing, and sex is embarrassing. And, Lion was embarrassing. It made you feel like Van Morrison, all uncontrollable noises and strange eruptions."

In any case, Dederer's book is only tangentially about yoga. It could just as easily have been called "How to Be a Perfect Mom, Wife and Daughter in the Uber-Liberal Confines of the Pacific Northwest."

Dederer proves an effective storyteller. She knows how to set up a punch line, how to foreshadow a big moment, how to create drama out of the everyday bits of a life. Yoga is the catalyst, the act that repeatedly forces her to look inward.

"Poser" opens with Dederer in Camel pose complaining to her instructor, Fran, about a "feeling in my chest, a kind of scary, tight feeling." To which Fran matter-of-factly replies, "Oh, that's fear. Try the pose again."

Later in the book, Dederer is in Cobbler's pose and bursts into tears. The silence that made DeGeneres think of Clorox brought Dederer back to the near-death of her infant daughter, Lucy, an episode she had suppressed for months on end.

Being a mom is never easy, but especially not in Dederer's clique, where, as she tells it, the pressure is on to breast-feed kids nearly out of toddlerhood, and to allow them to sleep in the marital bed until nearly into their teens. Organic food and wooden toys are de rigueur.

Yoga fostered deeper contemplation, which the author turns into a lively and engaging telling of her own parents' breakup (they never technically divorced) and her unusual, bohemian upbringing among hippies on various islands in Puget Sound.

Dederer never quite decides what to make of yoga after a decade, though she's still at it by memoir's end. Is it a religion? A form of exercise? A path toward enlightenment? Weight loss?

"I could see that the yoga taught in the sutras was different from the yoga that was taught in The Pradipika, which was different from the yoga that was taught at the studio," she writes. "But I was a magpie, a bricoleur, a pragmatist: I would take what I needed, and logic be hanged."

Bill Eichenberger is a Columbus, Ohio critic who writes at the bookserf blog.